Lefebvre reminds us of the antagonistic character of technology in an antagonistic society. The question is if and how information technology is shaped in ways and shaping ways that advance capitalism or socialist self-management, where social groups control their “conditions of existence, of living and surviving” (CEL3, 153)
Based on Lefebvre’s CEL, the next section deepens the engagement with the notion of ideology
5.5 The Communication of Ideology
There are representations of everyday life that take on the form of culture, knowledge, and ideologies (CEL2, 60–61). The critique of everyday life reveals the ideological character of such representations. It studies both the “empirical modality for the organization of human life” and the “representations which disguise this organization” (138). For Lefebvre (CEL1), Marxism is “a critical knowledge of everyday life” (148) that tears away “the veil of ideologies” (147), especially it is a critique of individualism, mystifications, mystified consciousness, money, needs, labour, and bourgeois freedom (148–175).
Lukács (1971) argues that “the daily life of bourgeois society” is shaped by “unthinking, mundane reality” (101), where the human being’s existence is “reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system” (90) and where reality “appears to be unmediated” (Schein der Unmittelbarkeit [literally: appearance of immediacy], 163). Lefebvre (CEL1, 152) argues that fetishism and alienation in capitalism create individualism and private consciousness, individuals who are “deprived of truth” and are “separated from […] concrete human social reality, deprived of a consciousness of the practical, historical and social whole.
The fetishism of capitalism’s immediacy confronts human beings in everyday life. Everyday life is full of commodities, money, capital, and other things. Class relations and relations of dominations disappear behind the immediacy of things. Capitalist society, exploitation, and domination thereby appear to be normal and natural. Capitalist society makes humans forget their own historicity. The “fetish of the pure objectivity of economic relations obscures the fact that they are really relations between” humans (Lukács 1971, 240). While Merrifield (2006, 150–151) stresses the differences between Lefebvre and Lukács, Gardiner (2000, 79) and Trebitsch (1991, xvii-xix) point out the similarities. Lukács and Lefebvre were both influenced by Hegel’s dialectical philosophy and Marx’s theory of alienation. They are both Hegelian, praxisoriented Marxist philosophers. Denying the parallels that undoubtedly exist between these two thinkers is a disservice to strengthening Hegelian, humanist Marxism today, an approach to which both Lukács and Lefebvre contributed.
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Theorists